What is a negative in photography?

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In photography, a negative is a film image on transparent base where the brightness values are reversed: light areas become dark and dark areas become light. This inverted image is produced during exposure and development on film, and it serves as the intermediate from which a positive print is made. When you print, light is projected through the negative onto photographic paper, so the tones are flipped back to normal, yielding a correct, viewable image. In color work, negatives still carry the inverted tonal information across color layers, and printing reverses that to produce natural colors. This is different from a camera lens, which is just a part of the camera, or a digital image file, which is a direct digital capture, or a color printing process itself, which is the method used to produce prints from either negatives or digital files.